Monday, October 24, 2016

A big THANK YOU to Marian @ Seams to Be Sew and Amy @ Sew Incredibly Crazy for hosting this Blog Hop! I've worked with them on a few hops in the past and it has been wonderful but I am SOOOOO excited to be participating in this hop because it's HALLOWEEN!!!!!!

With a business name like Batts in the Attic, people rarely figure out that I’m a quilting company. They just think that I can’t spell very well and that I like Halloween! Actually, I am a good speller, but haven’t studied up enough to win one of those cool spelling bees that kids do on TV while winning oodles of scholarship money. But I do LOVE Halloween.

While attending the annual retreat in South Carolina of the Pieceful Hearts Quilters Guild, I met a lady named Linda Yehle who made the most adorable embellished mini quilts. I asked her if she could make a Halloween, specifically batty, one for me and she said yes! I was so excited when I got her email last month telling me that she had finished and I could hardly wait for the mail to bring it – well, it was definitely worth that jumping-up-and-down wait, don’t you think? I just love my little “Batty Mini Sue” and she will be my most essential Halloween decoration EVER!

I also have been working on a Halloween quilt from a kit I bought a few years ago. I started it at Quilt Market last October in Houston and started working on it again last month. Got the top finished! I’ll be traveling and teaching the whole month of October, so it won’t be quilted this month, but I was so happy to get the top done that it’s OK! I get home from Quilt Market on Halloween, so I’ll be just in time to hand out candy and check out all the cool costumes!

What I loved about the kit, and why I had to buy it, was that it had a very high percentage of bats in the fabrics, including the border fabric. Lots and lots and lots of bats!!

Dawna Harrison, owner of my local quilt store, Bolts in the Bathtub, is always keeping her eyes open for bat fabrics – she texted me a pic of this one last week…and told me she got me a little. No idea what “little” means, but I’m excited just the same!

It seems like there are good bat years – where you can find batty socks, earrings, decorations, etc. – and bad bat years, where you can only find all those things in jack-o-lanterns or cats or spiders. This has not been a great bat year so far; at least, I haven’t found many – have you? Am I just not shopping at the right places? Clue me in!!

Monday, October 17, 2016

My awesome assistant Monica is one of the most organized people in the world! She has to be – she works with me! And keeping me organized (at least the printed and electronic “faces” of me that the public sees) is just one of her many jobs; she also does website, blog, and social media posting for other companies as well as mine and has a husband and two adorable littles, one just starting school and the other still at home. And she does this all while keeping an active extended family life and a neat home – I’ll bet her car is even neat and clean, unlike mine which my husband calls a giant purse with wheels!

A few weeks ago, Ms. Organization and I were on the phone and she said that during falltime, people like to get/keep organized and that we should write some blog posts about it. It took me several minutes to stop laughing at the idea that I could possibly write anything like that or that anybody would believe me if I did! But when we were talking a bit later, the topic came up again and I told her thatsheshould write organizational posts on my blog for the benefit of our readers. You guys will love her – she’s knowledgeable, fun and snarky, in a good way – and I can certainly learn a bunch from anything she has to share.

Obviously, I could benefit from her tips and tricks!

Soon Monica will introduce herself to you and tell you about how she keeps all the balls in the air as she juggles her life, work, and play!

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Quilty Box doesn't number their shipments, so I'm not sure how many I have received. One thing that is interesting to me is that some of the shipments really have nothing to do with quilting, like this one.

It has all the materials to make a fabric and mesh bag, including the batting (so I guess you must quilt the fabric before you assemble the bag?) and a bright apple green zipper.

Here's the card explaining the contents; the collection was curated by Annie Unrein.

There were half yard cuts of fabric that I liked -- keeping that!

Here's the project -- a fold-over organizer!

Everything is included to make it...

And an inspirational card that I think is worth framing in any sewing room.

So, would you like to win this? Everything except the fabrics is up for grabs -- I am somewhat of a fabric hoarder!

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Even though I haven’t taken in new customer work for quite a while, I still had a couple of things hanging around. The first night of the retreat I did some minor quilting in a border of a pictorial quilt and the second day I did some pretty intricate feather work on another quilt. After that, I got to play with some piecing.

The first one I grabbed was this fun Halloween quilt that I had purchased as a kit at a quilt show a few years ago:

I had done all of the snowball blocks and quite a bit of the piecing for
the other blocks, so I got that all finished up. Here it is on my
bedroom floor ready to have the blocks put together. Unfortunately, my
bedroom floor is my biggest open space, so things tend to get laid out
there. It does give me incentive to get it done, though, as I watch Dan
skirt around the quilt pieces so he won’t mess them up!

LOVE these fabrics!!!!

Once I got those blocks done, I started on the last project I had brought. It was featured in the summer issue of BLOCK Magazine:

It’s a real easy layer cake quilt with sashing that makes friendship stars in each corner. They did it in patriotic fabrics; I had a jelly roll that was 20 black strips and 20 white ones and a layer cake with a lot of black and white in it, so mine will be different, but still fun and easy. I’ll have to get that one done fairly soon while I can still buy fabric for the border in one of the prints in the layer cake. So it’s next up for the bedroom floor space!

Monday, October 3, 2016

Here are some of the quilts that people were working on at Cindy’s Auburn retreat a couple of weeks ago:

The retreats are held at the Mercy Retreat Center where we have our own cozy rooms and good home cooking, plenty of space to spread out and sew, and the time to do it! Cindy brings lights, irons, cutting mats and some rulers, although if you are using specialty type rulers, you should always bring your own. Everything is set up to have a good time and get a lot done.

Oh – and Cindy’s favorite youngest daughter is a professional baker!

Different dessert every night! This was the chocolate cake (I’m sure it has a much fancier name because it’s the best I’ve ever had) and her cheesecake would put everybody else out of business if she franchised, for sure!

My friend Linda met me up there this time – we actually tried to caravan, but just couldn’t seem to make our meeting up places work, so we went separately together! She was getting ideas from Cindy on how to quilt this one:

She also spent quite a lot of time binding a quilt she had made for her son Nick who just graduated from college this year and is moving to Austin for a new job. Here are two pics of that quilt:

I don’t think Linda and I signed up for the same retreat sessions next year, but we’ll both be back, definitely!

I've been quilting since 1990 and totally fell in love with the machine
quilting part of my hobby. I opened a machine quilting business in 1994
and have been quilting, traveling, and teaching ever since!What you’ll see in this blog are things that delight me! A lot of
quilting, some cooking (as well as meals I didn’t cook but got to eat!), a bit of travel, and fashion when those things come up…. And maybe shoes
and chocolate!Read more...